Originally posted by Leo Volont+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Leo Volont)</div>
You don't like Determinism, but your rejection of Free Will gives you no choice.
You must be very young. You must never have had to make a Choice in your life. These Choices that adults make are very far from coming automatically. yes, I understand how Existential Philosophy has plagued the European Intelligencia and still somewhat poisons some circles in America. They can't intellectually get around the idea that choices are not all determined somehow. Their materialism runs so deep that they have lost the sense that the Human Will does not have any inherent inertia... the human will is not necessarily carried along in a straight line.
Be careful with your denial of Will. It largely propelled an entire generation of European Existentialists into committing Suicide -- they felt that Suicide was the only possible expression of Free Will.
Anyway, why would you wish to indulge your sense of inquiry into this dark and morbid Existentialism. Besides being personally dangerous (the suicide rates really do factor a 100 to 1 over the general population) it is gloomy and pessimistic. One morally sleepwalks through life because one has convinced one's self that one has no Choice. We have Existentialists committing incest, and doing the worst drugs, all because their determinism has put them into a momentum driven straight line -- a straight line down. When one discontinues any active control over one's Life Direction, where is there to go but downhill?
Snap out of it.[/b]
Wow. You manage to misunderstand me in the very first sentence of your post, go on to make assumptions about me, and then top it off by saying I'm an existentialist who is going to commit suicide. Allow me to throw the fundation of that post out the window:
I don't dislike determinism, and never said I did. In fact, quite the opposite. What I am saying is that all actions in our lives are predetermined, because we all do what seems best to us. When you have a better, and a worse option, you are unable to choose the worse option. That means your path in life is determined by what you think is best.
Yes, I know that's a long way from depressing, existentialistic determinism. I also realize that 'what is best' may be somewhat free for you to decide (although I am pretty certain you do not have absolute freedom). My point is that true free will is something unexplainable, a dark factor that would somehow throw decisions in a random direction just because. That, to me, is a silly concept, yet I see so many people recoil from anything that only hints to limits to our free will or determinism. I don't see why.
Whether we are determined or not, what does it matter? Does it change the way you experience life? Does it remove your idea of free will from your mind? To me, life is a sensation that I perceive in a certain way. I want to know the truth, yes, but if I discover that I am predetermined, that does not change the fact that I can feel happiness, sadness, or have the idea I can influence my actions. Life is a sensation. Knowledge cannot change a sensation, only the way you look at it.
Originally posted by Leo Volont+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Leo Volont)</div>
My point is that BELIEVING Determinism to be True and Free Will to be false is likely to lead one into a morbid depression that will ultimately lead to suicide.[/b]
See above. You may not be able to cope with the idea that your life is determined. That does not mean the rest of us is.
<!--QuoteBegin-Darkmatic@
Now you can argue that all his decisions are pre programmed from his life experiences , or you can also say he is making an informed decision based on the data he was given .
Exactly. The information that is given to a person does inevitably lead to a certain decision, but is that a bad thing? Because someone had no other choice but to make the right decision, does that make it wrong?
<!--QuoteBegin-DistantClone
Deny free will, to me, is saying we have absolutely no control over life. We cannot create anything, we cannot think. We would all be mindless creatures on a conveyor belt being transported through life. Then, everything would be predetermined. What would be the point of "living" life? We could not grow, we could not learn. We could replace ourselves with math equations. We could skip right to the end, since we know how it would end, and avoid the misery. We would have no purpose to live.
Is that the way you feel? No? What if you accept determinism? Does that suddenly turn you into a mindless robot? Nope, it does not.
Originally posted by Leo Volont
No, obviously you never really ever had to make a choice. If you think that you have always had just one way to go, then obviously you have just been drifting through life. Life seems Determined to you, because you've never exerted a choice... you never broke your momentum in one direction and decided to go another way.
"I am older and wiser than you" is not a valid argument. You assume you are the one with the superior insight. If so, you should not have to resort to arguments of authority.
|
|
Bookmarks